I think the big choirs are more likely populated with people who can actually sing in key and had to pass an audition to get on the choir... Choirs like the Mormon Tabernacle and a few other high profile ones come to mind. Your average church choir is looking for almost anyone who claims they can sing, to fill the chairs. The result is an averaging of pitches to get reasonably close to sounding halfway decent. Except for Sister Agatha. Agatha always sings sharp and louder than everyone else with a voice that is reminiscent of something halfway between a factory time clock whistle and a banshee from the pits of Hades.

In the past, I had actually joined the church choir. I was one of the few who had permission to do "special music" solo's without the requirement of being in the choir. I did acquiesce to the requests of the music minister to join. It was a nightmare for me. I can hear very small deviations in pitch and being in the midst of a group of people who were singing either sharper or flatter than the given key of the song, well, I would often find myself just listening rather than adding to the cacophony. After a couple of weeks of utter boredom and frustration, I had another discussion with the MM and told him it simply wasn't my thing and he could either use me where I could be helpful or opt to not use me.

In another time.....even earlier. I knew a couple of piano tuners through the years. While watching and observing the actual tuning process, I noticed that they would tune using the strobe tuner and then reference the note against another note lower on the piano. Then they would tweek that higher note based on the lower one rather than what the strobe tuner said. Asking about that, I was told that you trust the piano to tell you the truth rather than the strobe tuner. It had to do with the characteristics of a given piano. While it was generally true that certain notes on a piano were correctly to pitch, those notes were something to pay attention to and adjust on a per basis. Kinda like the same way many guitarists have tuning issues with the G string on their guitar. I know that on my guitars, I can tune the G string but then I need to adjust it slightly flat on my guitars for it to work well in chords. It's fascinating how that works.

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